Sunday, 28 December 2014

Literary Fame

How to achieve it? Writing something really good, something
of undeniable (among those who have critical faculties) literary merit is
recommended only for those with a long-term, indeed post mortem, view. If you
don’t much mind if few people read your stuff now, so long as some people are
still reading it in a hundred or five hundred years, then that’s the way to go.

But most people would like to be rich and famous sort of
now-ish, and then there are two routes: the older and more difficult one is to
get your book banned, or anathematised, or otherwise strongly disapproved, by
some, usually nominally religious, organization or other. The Roman Catholic
Church used to be a good bet: write something that would get your book on the
Index Librorum Prohibitorum, or at least the Index Librorum Expurgatorum. This
would ensure huge sales at least in the world’s very large Roman Catholic
population. In Greece, you could annoy the Orthodox Church; with any luck they
would not only try to ban your book, they might anathematise or excommunicate
you yourself. Nikos Kazantzakis had great success like this, and so did the
lesser-known Kephallonian writer Andreas Laskaratos. A more recent and more
dangerous route is to annoy certain powerful people who claim to be Muslims.
Salman Rushdie went this way and very nearly got killed, but it ensured very
high sales for what is by no means his best book.

An easier method is to use money, and it is by far the most
common way now, being done routinely every day: You, or rather your publishers,
pay a bribe, often quite large, to Waterstone’s and, entirely regardless of
your book’s literary merit, they put it in the window and on the table just
inside the entrance. (No doubt Amazon has a similar bribe-taking system.)
People with no taste or discrimination, i.e. most of the people who go into
Waterstone’s in the first place, will eagerly buy it because it is a ‘Best
Seller’. (It is a ‘Best Seller’ because it's on the front table and people with no… yes you’ve got the
idea.)

As I say, that is the easier way, especially if you have
lots of money. No doubt something similar operates for films, so it’s a touch
surprising that Sony, or is it Disney, have opted for the old ‘disapproval’
route to get huge numbers of viewers and potential viewers of their dire piece
of idiocy about an American plot to kill the pompous, paranoid, and murderous buffoon who runs North Korea.